Category: Economy

Euro Exit Enters Italian Political Mainstream

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There are an increasing number of people who have questioned whether the continued existence of the Euro Zone makes sense, but in the countries that are large enough to matter (i.e. not Greece or Portugal) none of the mainstream parties (i.e. not the National Front) have even begun to question the currency union, until now:

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Many analysts have come to believe that the big danger to the Eurozone is political, not economic, that the loss of sovereignity, the continued squeeze of ordinary workers and the inability of countries to depreciate their currencies to help exports, make the benefits of Eurozone membership look questionable relative to the costs. But most political commentators have downplayed this risk, arguing that the benefits of Eurozone membership are so large that no incumbent would relinquish it. And indeed, the noise-making has come from parties like UKIP, who have no realistic odds of forming a government. Up until now, France’s Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, has seemed like the most likely contender among Eurozone-exit-favoring party leaders, but she is seen as more able to move France’s Overton than get France out of the Eurozone.

But Wolfgang Munchau, in the German edition of Der Spiegel, argues that a real shift has taken place in Italy. Unlike other countries, where the anti-Eurozone parties are seen as fringe players, in Italy, two factions that could realistically rule are both pushing for leaving the Eurozone.

From Munchau’s article, translation courtesy Google Translate:

One of the reasons why we even have the euro, was the broad political consensus in all countries who would later take part in it. No matter whether government or opposition, they were all for it. Just the consent of the opposition parties was important because in the course of 15 years, all have times over the government – the SPD in Germany, and the Socialists in France and Spain. The euro has characterized the many changes of government since its inception nearly 16 years ago survived.

………

 Unlike in Italy. There are now all opposition parties against the euro. First, the does not mean anything. The Italian Social Democrats under its chief Matteo Renzi have a large majority in parliament. And they enjoy a great, albeit not overwhelming support in the population. But in democracies oppositions come eventually to the government. And then of course it is important to know whether such a government would implement its anti-euro policy.

 The five-star Party, the largest opposition party, had spoken before the European elections for a referendum on the euro. The party was by then EUR critical, but the positions were not then as hard as now. Party leader Beppe Grillo has revealed its stance recently. His party, the euro zone as soon as possible to leave.

 In the regional elections in the northern Italian province Emiglia Romana Although Renzis party won almost, but the Northern League came on 30 per cent, which no one would have expected. The Lega is not just for a separation of northern Italy and southern Italy. It is now also include a separation from the euro. And this position was rewarded by voters.

 Italy’s exit would be the worst of all scenarios.

 And that has now brought Silvio Berlusconi on the taste. Really friendly europe Berlusconi was of course never. Opportunistic as it is, after all, he is now the future of the euro in question. Moreover, he and his party Forza Italia, the second largest in Italy, have an elaborate plan. Berlusconi wants to win back the monetary sovereignty by introducing home a parallel currency which is freely traded against the euro. Wages and salaries and of course the prices in the shops would be enrolled in this new currency.

 One would exchange their legacy euro and the new Italian Euros first one to one. Then the new currency would be released, whereupon its foreign currency would collapse immediately, probably 30 to 50 percent. The Italian economy would be competitive again with one blow.

This is a credible scenario, even if the name Berlusconi is invoked.

The problem is and remains, as Paul Krugman trenchantly observes, the Germans, and its leaders who are approaching the economic realities as a morality play for partisan electoral benefit:

………

 The point is a simple but important one: at this point any European imbalances associated with the surge in capital flows to the periphery after the formation of the euro have been worked off via extremely painful and costly disinflation. If we look at the whole period from 1999 to the present, most of Europe has had cost growth and inflation just about consistent with the ECB’s long-standing just-under-2 percent inflation target. There’s just one big outlier:

At this point the European imbalance problem is a German problem, caused by Germany’s persistent failure to have wage and price increases in line with what the euro requires. This German undervaluation is in turn exporting deflation to the rest of Europe. By contrast, France, Spain, and even Italy have been playing by the rules.

If you want to save the Euro, you have to kick Germany out.

Least Surprising Headline of this Week

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The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn’t Really Exist

—Businessweek

After the lede comes something that I have been saying for years:

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

All about a labor shortage in tech is not about a real labor shortage, it’s about creating a captive low wage workforce.

F%$# that.

Japan Once Again Proves that Contractionary Economics is ……… Contractionary

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It is no surprise that the Japanese, in their haste to go back to austerity when the first glimmers of light has driven their economy back into recession:

Japan’s economy unexpectedly fell into recession in the third quarter, a painful slump that called into question efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to pull the country out of nearly two decades of deflation.

The second consecutive quarterly decline in gross domestic product could upend Japan’s political landscape. Mr. Abe is considering dissolving Parliament and calling fresh elections, people close to him say, and Monday’s economic report is seen as critical to his decision, which is widely expected to come this week.

………

Rising sales taxes have been blamed for triggering the downturn by deterring consumer spending, and with Japan having now slipped into a technical recession, the chances that Mr. Abe will seek a new mandate from voters to alter the government’s tax program appear to have increased significantly.

The preliminary economic report, issued by the Cabinet Office, showed that gross domestic product fell at an annualized pace of 1.6 percent in the quarter through September. That added to the previous quarter’s much larger decline, which the government now puts at 7.3 percent, a slightly worse figure than in its last estimate of 7.1 percent.

………

Although the second part of the tax increase would not be carried out until October, Mr. Abe needs to decide what to do about it soon, to give Parliament time to change legislation if he opts to cancel or postpone it. If fully enacted, the plan would increase the tax on all goods and services sold in the country to 10 percent over 18 months. It now stands at 8 percent after the first increase in April.

Yeah, imposing crushing sales tax increases, taxes were taken from 5% to 8%, with an as yet not implemented increase to 10%, will discourage consumer spending, and have a deflationary effect. (See also Krugman saying, “I told you so,” here and here and about a gazillion other places.)

If you are concerned about the deficit, tax financial and currency speculation,  which, in addition to reigning in destabilizing speculation, would encourage that money to go into investments in plant, equipment, training, etc.

Mission Accomplished, Frau Merkel*

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It looks like Germany is finally running out the string on its beggar thy neighbor economy:

Germany’s exports are falling at the fastest rate since the global crisis in 2009, raising fears of a triple-dip recession and a disastrous relapse for the rest of the eurozone.

The country’s five economic institutes – or “Wise Men” – slashed their growth forecast for Germany from 2pc to 1.2pc next year, warning that the latest measures unveiled by the European Central Bank will add “hardly any” extra stimulus to the real economy and may be unworkable.

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the eurozone is at “serious risk” of falling back into recession if nothing is done, and is in danger of suffering a lost decade. “If the right policies are decided, if both surplus and deficit countries do what they have to do, it is avoidable,” she said. The wording is a clear call to Germany for an immediate shift in policy.

German exports slumped by 5.8pc in August as the crisis in Ukraine and Russia took its toll. “We’re no longer in a recovery,” said Volker Treier, head of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). He said geopolitical upsets may have pushed the economy over the edge into a “technical recession”, but added that Germany itself is also to blame for failure to break out of a slow-growth trap. “We have too little investment. That’s been the case for years,” he said.

The Wise Men said in a joint report that the German economy is now in “stagnation”, with unemployment likely to rise next year. “There are no signs of the long-awaited recovery yet. Corporate investment fell in the second quarter and there is hardly any evidence to suggest that this cautious approach to investment will change in the near future,” they said.

Germany has been running its economy by suppressing worker wages and domestic demand, and focusing on exports and trade surpluses.

Of course, that is also what they are suggesting for everyone else in the Euro zone, which of course does not works, because for every trade surplus, there has to be a corresponding trade deficit.

It’s a zero sum game, and they have managed to sufficiently impoverish their Euro Zone “partners” to the degree that they no longer can import German products, and now the Germans have no one to export to.

It should result in some policy changes in Germany, but it won’t while Merkel is Chancellor, because she has staked her political career on depicting the other members of the EU as lazy and profligate to her constituents.

*Horses whinnying.

Good News Everyone!

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Good news everyone!


I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

The language of negotiations differs in different societies.

In Japan, it is rare for someone to simply say no.

Instead, the culture is to obliquely mention difficulties, so the fact that the Japanese trade minister has stated that there has been no progress in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) constitutes a major rebuke:

Japan’s Trade Minister Akira Amari said he and his U.S. counterpart made no progress in bilateral talks that are key to an ambitious multilateral trade deal.

 “Japan made a flexible proposal, but we weren’t able to make further progress,” Amari told reporters on Wednesday evening in Washington. “Further negotiations are undecided.”

This is unalloyed good news.

The TPP is not about free trade.  In most areas (except perhaps for Japanese agricultural products), tariffs are pretty minimal these days.

This is about allowing rent seekers in insurance, finance, and IP protected industries (pharma, software patents, music, etc.) to further increase their profits by manipulating the government rules, i that are integral to their business models.

It’s a good thing that labor, environmental, consumer, and safety regulations aren’t going to be crucified on a cross of “free trade”. ……… For a while, at least.

The Jobs Numbers Suck.

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Nonfarm payrolls rose by 142,000 in August. Generally improvement in the employment situation starts at about 200,000:

American employers hired fewer workers than forecast in August and the jobless rate dropped because people left the workforce, bolstering those on the Federal Reserve who want to be more deliberate in removing monetary stimulus.

The 142,000 advance in payrolls was the smallest this year and followed a revised 212,000 gain in July, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The reading was lower than the most pessimistic estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent last month from 6.2 percent, reflecting a drop in joblessness among teenagers as well as the decline in labor participation.

………

The median projection in the Bloomberg survey of 91 economists called for a 230,000 increase in August payrolls. Estimates ranged from increases of 190,000 to 310,000 after a previously reported 209,000 July gain. Revisions to prior reports subtracted a total of 28,000 jobs from overall payrolls in the previous two months.

The participation rate, which indicates the share of working-age people in the labor force, decreased 0.1 percentage point to 62.8 percent, matching the lowest since 1978.

Basically, this just sucks.

Jared Bernstein Calls for Dropping Reserve Currency Status for the Dollar in the New York Times

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His argument is rather similar to the one that I have, that the dollar’s status as a reserve currency artificially inflates the value of the currency, along with contributing to the excessive financialization of our economy, but the fact that a former Obama staffer is doing it in the Times is significant:

There are few truisms about the world economy, but for decades, one has been the role of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It’s a core principle of American economic policy. After all, who wouldn’t want their currency to be the one that foreign banks and governments want to hold in reserve?

But new research reveals that what was once a privilege is now a burden, undermining job growth, pumping up budget and trade deficits and inflating financial bubbles. To get the American economy on track, the government needs to drop its commitment to maintaining the dollar’s reserve-currency status.

………

In 2013, America’s trade deficit was about $475 billion. Its deficit with China alone was $318 billion.

Though Mr. Austin doesn’t say it explicitly, his work shows that, far from being a victim of managed trade, the United States is a willing participant through its efforts to keep the dollar as the world’s most prominent reserve currency.

………

Note that as long as the dollar is the reserve currency, America’s trade deficit can worsen even when we’re not directly in on the trade. Suppose South Korea runs a surplus with Brazil. By storing its surplus export revenues in Treasury bonds, South Korea nudges up the relative value of the dollar against our competitors’ currencies, and our trade deficit increases, even though the original transaction had nothing to do with the United States.

………

But while more balanced trade might raise prices, there’s no reason it should persistently increase the inflation rate. We might settle into a norm of 2 to 3 percent inflation, versus the current 1 to 2 percent. But that’s a price worth paying for more and higher-quality jobs, more stable recoveries and a revitalized manufacturing sector. The privilege of having the world’s reserve currency is one America can no longer afford.

It’s really nothing new, but the fact that it’s Mr. Bernstein and the New York Times does appear to indicate that this idea is gaining currency.

About f%$#ing time.

Investment Banker is New Economy Minister In France

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Francois Holland makes the worst possible choice:

After a day and a half of protracted negotiations following the forced exit of three rebels from his cabinet, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, on Tuesday night appointed a new economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker on the right of the Socialist party.

As President François Hollande struggled to overcome a political crisis sparked by leftwing dissidents who campaigned against the Socialist government’s austerity policies, Valls also announced that finance minister Michel Sapin, a close ally of Hollande, was being put in charge of overseeing public accounts. Macron is close to Sapin and Hollande, which should ensure that the government in future speaks with one voice on economic policy.

Five months after putting Valls in charge of a “fighting” government, Hollande had demanded “clarity” and “coherence” following the surprise resignation of the cabinet, including the economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg.

Valls has vowed to pursue the government’s three-year economic plan providing for an easing of the tax burden on businesses and 50 billion euros in spending cuts.

(Emphasis mine)

A disastrous wrong policy with disastrous bad optics.

Hollande is imploding faster than Nicolas Sarkosy.

The German promulgated austerity fetish is going to give France a president le Pen.

France’s Hollande Doubles Down on Austerity in Futile Attempt to Boost his Prospects

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Francois Holland’s Economy Minister calls out the German austerity fetish, and in response, he reshuffles his cabinet to give him the boot:

French president François Hollande took the biggest gamble of his two-year-old presidency on Monday by ordering his reformist prime minister to form a new government which will exclude Socialist dissidents demanding an end to economic austerity policies dictated by Germany.

 Casting off his characteristic indecision, Hollande agreed to prime minister Manuel Valls’s offer to dissolve the cabinet amid a political crisis triggered by the country’s outspoken economy minister.

 The dissolution of the cabinet allows Hollande to form a new government without dissenting voices.

 In a defiant farewell speech at the economy ministry, Arnaud Montebourg, said the austerity drive in France and Europe was a “financial absurdity,” and accused Hollande and Valls of ignoring his pleas for a “moderate and balanced” alternative.

 Less than an hour after he was called into Valls’s office for a 15-minute meeting, Montebourg said austerity-inspired tax increases had undermined purchasing power and has led to the rise of extremist parties.

 Montebourg said the “incorrect” austerity policies followed by the European Central Bank and EU member states had “continued to mire the eurozone in recession and soon, deflation”. Education minister Benoît Hamon and culture minister Aurélie Filippetti also said that they would not take part in the new government.

Holland has decided that he has to throw in with Angela Merkel’s twisted morality play in the desperate hope for his own political survival, his popularity is currently at a Cheneyesque 17% (!) approval rating.

It’s not gonna work, austerity will continue to depress economies and stoke the political right.

So the next president of France is either going to be a Gaullist, or Marine Le Pen.*

*I think that I just threw up in my mouth.

How is that Euro Working for You?

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It appears that the Euro, and the associated austerity, has precipitated a depression that exceeds what was seen in Europe the 1930s:

As I was arguing last week, it’s time to call the eurozone what it really is: one of the biggest catastrophes in economic history.

There have been plenty of those lately. And it’s not just the Great Recession. It’s the way we’ve struggled to make up the ground we lost since. The United States, for one, has had its slowest postwar recovery. Britain has had its slowest one, period. But, six and a half years later, Europe has distinguished itself by not having much of a recovery at all. And, as you can see above, that’s about to make it worse than the worst of the 1930s.

‘ve taken the chart above from Nicholas Crafts, and extended it a bit to put Europe’s depression in, well, even more depressing perspective. Eurozone GDP still hasn’t gotten back to its 2007 level, and doesn’t look like it will anytime soon. Indeed, it already wasn’t clear if its last recession was even over before we found out the eurozone had stopped growing again in the second quarter. And not even Germany has been immune: its GDP just fell 0.2 percent from the previous quarter.

It’s a policy-induced disaster. Too much fiscal austerity and too little monetary stimulus have crippled growth like almost never before. Europe is doing worse than Japan during its “lost decade,” worse than the sterling bloc during the Great Depression, and barely better than the gold bloc then—though even that silver lining isn’t much of one. That’s because, at this rate, it’ll only be another year until the eurozone is well behind the gold bloc, too.

So how is Europe making the Great Depression look like the good old days of growth? Easy: by ignoring everything we learned from it.

The Euro is a paper gold standard, and much like the German overreaction to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s led them to on stay on the gold standard too long, which created misery and social unrest, we are now seeing the Germany’s current paranoia about inflation creating misery and social unrest.

The historical echoes to both world wars is deafening.

GDP Up in 2nd Quarter

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GDP grew at a 4% annual rate in the 2nd quarter:

The United States economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter of the year, shaking off the negative effects of an unusually harsh winter and stirring hopes that it might finally be establishing a solid enough footing to put the lingering effects of the recession squarely in the past.

The Commerce Department, in its initial estimate for April, May and June, reported on Wednesday that the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 percent, surpassing expectations.

During the first quarter, output shrank at a rate of 2.1 percent, less than had been reported. The department had earlier said that first-quarter output fell 2.9 percent.

A lot of the growth is increases in inventory, and averaging the two, we are still looking at about an anemic 2% annual growth rate.

Meh.

If You Can’t Make School Vouchers Work in Sweden, You Can’t Make it Work Anywhere

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It turns out that Milton Friedman education reform, much like all of his real word ideas, has turned out to be a huge clusterf%$#:

Every three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.

 The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.

 Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

 ………

 But Swedish school reforms did incorporate the essential features of the voucher system advocated by Friedman. The hope was that schools would have clear financial incentives to provide a better education and could be more responsive to customer (i.e., parental) needs and wants when freed from the burden imposed by a centralized bureaucracy. And the Swedish market for education was open to all, meaning any entrepreneur, whether motivated by religious beliefs, social concern, or the almighty dollar, could launch a school as long as he could maintain its accreditation and attract “paying” customers.

 For a while, at least if media accounts of the reforms are any indication, things looked like they were going pretty well. Voucher school students consistently outperformed their counterparts at government schools; in 2008, the London Telegraph described the reforms’ impact as “tremendous.” The number of private schools increased tenfold in less than a decade, with a majority run as for-profits.

 But in the wake of the country’s nose dive in the PISA rankings, there’s widespread recognition that something’s wrong with Swedish schooling. As part of ongoing efforts to determine the root cause, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (the equivalent of the U.S. federal government’s Department of Education) called for a regrading of a subset of standardized tests administered during 2010 and 2011. In total, nearly 50,000 students at all grade levels from more than 700 schools had their tests in English, Swedish, science, and math re-evaluated.

BTW, Friedman’s ideas were implemented for about a year at the beginning of the brutally totalitarian rule of Augusto Pinochet with the assistance of his acolytes, the “Chicago Boys”.

After less than a decade, these “reforms” collapsed under the pressure of incompetence and corruption:

After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile’s public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet’s Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)

If you hear Milton Friedman’s name invoked in support of an idea, be very, very afraid.*

*Full disclosure, I do agree with Milton Friedman that Marijuana should be legalized.†
†More full disclosure: I know Milton Friedman’s son, David Friedman, though our discussions have entirely dealt with medieval history.

Queue the Inflation Trolls

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The Producer Price Index rose by 0.6% in April:

U.S. producer prices recorded their largest increase in 1-1/2 years in April as food prices surged, in a potential sign inflation pressures may be creeping up.

The Labor Department said on Wednesday its producer price index rose 0.6 percent, the biggest gain since September 2012. That built on a March increase that was nearly as large.

The department revamped it PPI series at the start of the year to include services and construction. Since then, it has been surprisingly volatile, largely because of big swings in prices received for trade services.

Still, economists, who had expected only a 0.2 percent gain, saw the latest rise as an indication that price pressure may be building. Officials at the Federal Reserve have long worried that inflation was running too low.

I will note that the trend for this year is still less than 6%, which is where I would set the target, and it appears that their statistical set is kind of hinky, but expect the inflation gnomes to come out and run around with their hair on fire.

So Not Shocked

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The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that “pro business” policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify “business-friendly” policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy “variables,” such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there’s an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index–low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That’s the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states–California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota–dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Welcome to the 3rd World America.

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The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:

Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.

The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.

The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.

The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.

The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.

Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves.